Faith and Fertility: Creighton Model Intro Session

On Monday, I roped DH into attending an introductory session of the Creighton Model of Fertility Care with me. It was a one hour session with an RN who has additionally done another 13 month training in fertility care/charting.

As you all know, I've been watching and learning about my cycles for years (like at least 11 years) but I still learned a couple things. I highly recommend this class for anyone wishing to avoid pregnancy or for trying to achieve it.

After our first miscarriage back in 2006, I started charting my temps and watching my cervical changes to tell when I ovulated. I did for that for over 3 years and got completely burned out by it. I was able to learn enough about my body and know exactly when I ovulated without charting, so I stopped. Obviously a lot can (and has) changed in my body since almost 8 years ago We decided to try the Creighton Model for charting and will be meeting with Cathy (our fertility care manager) over the next several months. I've never had a professional look at my charts before so I'm excited (is excited the right word??) to see what she has to say about them.

It's all about the cervical mucus people. For real. And I'm going to talk about it so if you're squeamish, look away now!

The Creighton Model of charting is kind of what I had been doing in the past, but on steroids. Taking my temps every morning isn't necessary but totally acceptable as I'd like a secondary way to show I ovulated. Like I said earlier, it's all about the mucus. I have to record every day the type of cervical mucus I have. Fun right? Is it stretchy? Cloudy? Clear? Is it sticky? How wet is it? How FAR does it stretch? One inch? Two? I record any pain in my ovaries, and what color AF is. My goal is to find my "Peak" clear stretchy mucus day. My charts should be able to show abnormalities in hormones, if I have enough fertile days, etc. I will get referred to a doctor in the area (Cathy works with two) who are trained in NaPro Technologies if anything abnormal is found so they can continue my care. I've never had to be so descriptive with my mucus before. When charting about my CM (cervical mucus) in the past, I used 4 labels such as "dry, creamy, wet, or egg white" now I have like 25 ways/codes to explain my discharge. Ha!

I do need to get blood work done. I'm concerned about my FSH levels at the moment. I did take a menopause indicator test which measures FSH levels over 25iu in urine. I'm fairly sure it was negative but I could tell where the "test" line was so I think it's best to have that looked at. (Though, from what I'm reading, you can't do much about a high FSH level anyway.) Amazon had a bunch of cheaper tests but all got really bad reviews. This one from Walgreens was much better so I decided to try it.